May 28, 2020: King Felipe and Queen Letizia held a meeting with young talents. Eight young Spanish talents from research, technology, business, culture and social action have exposed, in an open dialogue with the King and Queen that lasted for two hours how they believe the COVID19 pandemic is affecting the Spanish society and what is their vision for the future.
Don Felipe and Doña Letizia have highlighted, during the dialogue, the need to value what young people are doing for the country.
“We are still in full battle and trying to recover a life as normal as possible. In this situation we have to look ahead, we have to not only recover, get back on our feet and not lose hope and, in this, well, without a doubt, there is a very important role that is to highlight and push everything you are doing young people in many areas in our country”, stated Don Felipe.
"There is a strength that we must put much more value, there is a need for engagement and new messages and I believe that the youth, with your preparation and disposition, are one of the fundamental elements for that new recovery and energy that we need," he added.
Her Majesty the Queen pointed out that the different “tasks, capacities and companies” of the young people present in the dialogue and “which reflect very well that attitude of seeing things and getting hooked on this more positive side to continue”
Eight young people, four women and four men born between 1984 and 1994 participated in the dialogue.
Teresa Arroyo Gallego, chief Data Scientist at nQMedical and telecommunications engineer from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), returned from Boston "to form a team. (With the pandemic) the idea of teleworking has been strengthened and pharmaceutical companies have looked more to digital. The health issue is very traditional and now we are starting to look more at technology "
According to Pablo González Ruiz de la Torre, Trivu CEO, he thinks that "talent is greatly affected by this crisis. You don't get away with anything without energy and enthusiasm and our country is world champion in energy. Many times we lack confidence, vision and unity. What I love is the people, this country is a leader, it is because of its people. One of the projects I have is to place Madrid as the world capital of talent, so that they see this country as a place where the one to grow, work, develop. The year 2020 is the opportunity to start over, it is neither bad nor good, and here young people have a very important mission "
Lucía Zhu, a researcher at the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) believes that “it is clear that this crisis is telling us that research and science is a fundamental pillar of society. I would like to emphasize that right now the focus is on the coronavirus, but let's not forget all those diseases that still have no cure and need a cure; there we young people are going to be essential ”.
The founder of Cox Energy, Enrique Riquelme Vives believes that "photovoltaic energy is the cheapest non-polluting energy, seven times cheaper than polluting energy; and I believe that Latin America is a fundamental pillar for all Spaniards, to develop our growth through the same time as Spain, which has tremendous talent ”.
Likewise, Mireia Badía, co-founder of Grow.ly highlighted that “we left in 2014 and SMEs were very affected by the closure of bank financing. Now it is different, the ICOS have given a little more air, but I think it is a solution that will not prevent the closure of many companies in the medium term, much more effort must be made and that, without a doubt, will also affect young people, because we are the most vulnerable; government measures are going to be key for the future of the country, of SMEs and, consequently, of young people ”.
Francisco Javier Gutiérrez Álvarez, researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology CSIC, stressed that at the workplace level (with the pandemic), "we have continued going to the laboratory, with the support of the Government, the Ministry of Science, to continue working to develop a vaccine ( against the coronavirus) and responsibility, on a personal level it has been all chaos with a move and my wife's pregnancy, but luckily everything is going well. This crisis has made us see that we have a lot of potential that we are not knowing how to exploit ".
Arancha Martínez Fernández, founder of It Will Be, highlighted that “in recent years I have worked on a project, which is a BlockChain and Artificial Intelligence platform, with the labs (innovation centers) of the United Nations; In March, I was in Malaysia but I thought that with the pandemic, I wouldn't feel good if I couldn't do something for my country. What we have done is make the platform available to the country, there are already a hundred social entities in it. The crisis is very hard but it can be an opportunity to accelerate our digital transformation and increase social impact, through generating efficiencies. There will not be more resources and the needs are greater: the objective is to optimize each euro in the social sector so that with what we have we can do the maximum ”.
Norman Schaar Orive, co-founder of Vertical Robot added that “we have always seen that with optical fiber you could telework. We have detected an increase in users due to the fact that people are at home and cannot go out, but also a very interesting aspect is that virtual reality is a good alternative to socializing. Unlike a video game, in Virtual Reality you can gesture, you feel a presence of a person in another space and it gives an opportunity to high-risk people who are difficult to get out"
